Stories for all the lovely people*

About this time last year I found myself hunting down books for young African refugees. Now it's time to do it again. I'm looking for books for all the lovely people in the class, and I'm delighted to report that I have found a few more excellent titles to add to last year's list.

Fire on the Mountain, by Jane Kurtz and EB Lewis, is a re-telling of a traditional Ethiopian tale. Alemayu is a young cowherd. Circumstances force him to become the servant of a boastful rich man who claims to be the only one able to spend a night on the cold mountain with nothing but a shemma for warmth. But Alemayu has done so many times. The rich man forces him to prove it, but when he finds out Alemayu stayed warm by looking at someone's fire on another mountain, denies him his reward. So Alemayu's sister cooks up a great feast for the rich man. As he sits and enjoys the cooking smells wafting in from another room, the rich man is served... nothing. 'What kind of person thinks that smells of food can fill a man's stomach?' demands the rich man. 'The same kind of person who believes that looking at a fire can keep a boy warm,' answers the sister. Check mate!

Fire on the Mountain is gently illustrated in the soft muted colours of the desert. The characters are beautifully depicted, especially Alemayu and his sister; and I very much hope some of the Ethiopian kids in the class recognise the story and enjoy this re-telling. But I must admit I am looking forward to reading this with one particular boy for another reason. The rich man's feast features injera, the Ethiopian bread; and this boy has a passion for it. When I first asked this boy if he ate injera, he was so astonished that I knew about injera that he actually fell over backwards. I look forward to seeing his reaction when he finds injera mentioned in a book!

Jane Kurtz also wrote In the Small, Small Night (illustrated by Rachel Isadora). It's the story of two refugee children trying to get to sleep; but Kofi is afraid that he will forget his family in Ghana now that he is in America. So his sister Abena, remembering the village storyteller, recounts traditional stories from home: Anansi and the pot of wisdom; and the turtle and the vulture. Between their stories and the conversation, Kofi is soothed back to sleep.

The story is told without a hint of mawkishness; yet it is very touching as these two young children, so far from home, talk about their fears and what they have left behind. But what is just as moving is the way Abena has brought the gift of storytelling with her from Ghana. The wisdom contained in those stories will sustain them as they start at a new school, in a new culture, where everything is different.

One small difference is the hair! The girls in my class and I wonder at each other's. 'Why you cut it like a boy?' they demand when my hair is freshly cropped; but they like to stroke it all the same, and play with my daughter's bunches, admiring its softness. I adore their hair right back, whether it's braided down their backs, or plaited in wild directions, or tipped with beads. Thus I was delighted to find the book I Love My Hair, by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and also illustrated by EB Lewis, a celebration of African hair. In this story, a little girl is having her hair done. As her mother combs and tugs, the little girl's eyes fill with tears. So her mother stops, and tells her stories about her beautiful hair: it can be woven like yarn into a 'puffy little bun'; it can be parted into rows and planted with braids like a garden; it can cloud around her head like the world; it can stick out in ponytails like wings. And the little girl, thinking of all these things, imagines she can fly.

The illustrations dreamily illustrate the metaphors for the girl's hair; and the image of the girl sitting between her mother's thighs having her hair combed is so intimate, you can feel the weight of the bodies leaning into each other. A wonderful book.

*which is what I call the kids as a group, and what they now call their class to me.

Life in Abundance

I am an Australian wandering the world for a couple of months, chivvied out of my house by my travel-loving husband. A few weeks ago, in Glasgow, I found a tiny second hand bookshop in an alleyway off a nondescript side street. While my six- and three-year-olds chatted to the owner and played with the resident cats, I negotiated the poky aisles. It was one of those stores with books shelved to the ceiling, books stacked 30 high in front of the shelves, and books stacked 20 high in front of the stacks in front of the shelves. I spent most of the time saying 'excuse me' to the other customers as we squeezed past each other, arching over stacks and bending our bodies around one another like a literary form of twister.

The shop was intriguing. And in one teetering pile, a slim purple book caught my eye. I slid it out, opened it up, began to read, and immediately experienced that electrical jolt you get when you pick up the exact book you need, the book you know you will read time and again until you die.

Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (American Lives), by Ted Kooser, is an account of daily life in rural Nebraska. It is not a linear telling, nor a story as such, but instead a collection of observations and memories grouped by season. I mean no disrespect when I say that it reads like an unusually beautiful blog, the posts lovingly crafted. Individually, each piece stands alone, whether a paragraph or three pages, and provides much to reflect on. Together, the pieces create an intimate portrait of place, person and community.

The notes are suffused with gentle humour and tinged with sadness. This is the writing of a man aware of his mortality and our frailty, who yet sees that life is good. He uses the stories of fields and families, small towns and tools, to create something strong and good. The writing drew me in so that I, too, smelled the wild plums in the hedgerow and saw the beer cans nestled in the undergrowth; lay in his son's tree house and listened to the breeze rustle the branches; sat on his outdoor toilet in the early morning watching the sunrise; experienced the theatre of a garage sale; sniffed the cloves from his mother's ancient can; and longed to see a fox. And I too felt frustration at the louts spraying herbicide, the school board which closes the schools and busses the kids for miles, the farmer who dumps insecticide into the water in his irrigation well. Kooser takes the reader on a ramble through his observations and memories such that, by the benediction – the only way to describe the final piece – I felt I had come to know him.

Local Wonders has taken its place on my mental shelf of all time favourites, along with works by Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Marilynne Robinson and Robert Farrar Capon – all writers who cherish the mundane. Like these authors, Kooser has written a book about the everyday, to read slowly and savour, to dip into again and again, to draw nourishment from.

My life's thesis is this: if we could learn to see and cherish the gifts of the daily – the sight of a spider web as we walk down the street, the thread of song that comes to mind as we wash dishes, a baby's smile – then we would have a means to counter the gnawing insatiable appetite for more which dominates our culture: more clothes, more food, more sex, more experience, more power, more money, more thrills. This book invites the reader to step back, take a breath, and look around. By reading such a book, and learning to paying attention to our own lives, we might discover a deep and joyful truth: that all of us have not only enough, but riches and life in abundance.

> Ted Kooser Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (American Lives) (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

So much... and so little

Our house is full of books. We periodically shuffle things around to find ways of fitting them into the bookcases we have. We keep board books in a big tub, and picture books in Papa's old milk crate. Books teeter in piles on the dining table. They sit on our bedside tables, and are stacked on our bedhead. I find them shoved into the bathroom shelves by young readers forced to take baths. We have books of anecdotes in the toilet (where else?), recipe books in the kitchen, and random books piled on every surface. It drives me mad, it's such a mess - but it makes me feel comfortable, and tells me that I'm home.

Only three miles away is a primary school on a housing estate. I recently received a message forwarded from a teacher there. Of the kids in one class, only three had a single children's book at home. Those books were scribbled and torn. A kid in another class had brought in a book he found in a cereal packet so that it could be kept safe from his many siblings. Most of the kids are refugees; most come from the Horn of Africa. The teacher was appealing to book lovers to donate new books, so these kids could all take home a book or two for their very own.

Book person that I am, I cried and cried. And now I'm out a-hunting. What sort of books to buy? These kids are poor African refugees living in flats, probably separated from loved ones. And yet almost every children's picture book I have seen features happy white nuclear families living in the suburbs. Where are the black families? The single parent families? The families living in high rise estates? And I'm not talking about 'issues' books, just normal books that portray every day people living every day lives in flats, or with one parent, or in all sorts of households. People who are black, or Middle Eastern, or Asian. People like our neighbours. Because it seems to me that these kids need to see familiar faces, familiar spaces, represented in books if books are ever to become safe places and welcome friends.

Here's my list so far. It's short, so I'm very open to ideas! If you have any suggestions of other books, make a comment so I can find them too. I know amazon, and I'm not afraid to use it!

*Oscar's Half Birthday by Bob Graham. Oscar is six months old! His mum (African heritage, cornrow hair) and his dad (dweeby white guy in birkies) and his sister decide to celebrate with a picnic. So they leave their highrise flat, go down the graffitied elevator, wander under the railway line and up to the local park. Locals join in the happy birthday song, including an elegant lady in hijab. Looks like my suburb!

*So Much by Trish Cooke. An Afro-Caribbean family gathers to celebrate Daddy's birthday. As they arrive, each member kisses or bounces or pinches or hugs the baby, because they all love him, "SO much!" Written with a Caribbean lilt, it's a delight to read aloud.

*Catch That Goat!: A Market Day in Nigeria by Polly Alakija. Ayoka has to look after the goat while her Mama goes out. But the goat escapes and runs through a busy Nigerian market, stealing goods along the way. Ayoka searches the market looking for the goat, greeting stall holders and counting what has been taken. The illustrations are gorgeously rich, their patterning evoking African cloth. And the adult reader is especially entertained by the market signs: Mama Put Cool Spot, serving cow leg soup; or Midas, The Ultimate Barbing Zone. An old housemate of mine lived in Ghana for a year; the signs in the book remind me intensely of her photographs which adorned our dining room wall.

*Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo by Julius Lester. Remember Little Black Sambo? Well, here it is reclaimed by one of the foremost African American story tellers of our time. It's set in the mythical country of Sam-Sam-Samara, where animals and people talk and are friends. The writing is in a Southern voice ("Ain't I fine?!" says Sam when he buys his new clothes), and Sam is wise to the tigers' goings on. Lester Pinkney's drawings are exquisite: trees have images patterned into their bark; tiny beetles are tucked into odd corners; faces are wrinkled and gentle and wise.

*Full, Full, Full of Love by Trish Cooke. An African American family gathers to enjoy Sunday lunch together.

Any other suggestions?

Serendipity, mostly

I just love books. I love holding them. I love smelling them. I love turning their pages. I love reading them. So you'd think I love new bookshops, right?

Actually, I don't. I find myself so overwhelmed by our society's wealth, by the sheer amount of stuff that is available to us, that I usually can't face a shop full of new books. I shrink in the face of those towering shelves stuffed full, perpetually refilled from boxes and crates which were trucked from factories, perhaps even flown in. I feel sickened by the waste involved; I read somewhere that more than half of all new books manufactured in the US are pulped. I worry about the clean water that has gone into making the paper. I feel manipulated by the beautifully designed covers and gorgeous new editions which are aimed at bibliophiles like me. And, anyway, I'm not that interested in a book which is too easy to find.

So how does someone like me buy books? Second hand, of course! and on instinct. I don't look for books unless I get a particular buzz. When I feel my antennae tingling, I'll pop into an op shop or a used bookstore and comb the shelves. I never know what I'll find, just that something is there waiting for me. And when I see it, I start feeling dizzy. The world whirls, and for a moment there is nothing except me, and The Book. I pick it up. I take it to the counter. I hand over my dollar. I buy it.

Anticlimactically, I take it home and add it to a pile. What? you say. But you just bought it, antennae quivering!

But finding a book doesn't mean it's time to read it yet. It sits on a pile, even a bookshelf, waiting. In our house, a book might wait for years. I know it's there, but until I feel my instinct tingle again, I wait too. There's no point reading a book at the wrong time; I won't engage with it. But when I feel that tingle, that itch to read a particular book, then I know I will be carried away.

So that's how I find and read new (to me) books. What about books which I have already read, but have given away, or have never owned but absolutely must? Especially those that are out of print? How do I find those books? Then I wait. I lurk. I creep into old bookshops and check if they have this, or that. I mope and sigh, pining for a book. And then one day, joy! After months, usually years, of looking, it turns up. Such delight! It's like being united with an old friend.

(I must admit, the waiting sucks. From time to time, in sheer desperation, I check out an online secondhand bookseller. But while a package in the mail, even one sent to oneself, is gratifying, it certainly isn't the same as finding a book on a shelf. I don't feel an emotional attachment to books bought online; it's just too easy.)

There are books I can't decide whether or not to buy. I'm hooked on Patrick O'Brian's novels, and plan to read and re-read them for the rest of my life. But a friend has the series, as does my public library. Am I happy to keep borrowing these books? Or should I purchase them so I can lend them out to other people too? I might keep an eye out and buy any I find second hand. Then I can slowly build up the series, without having to face a new bookstore, and without feeling completely wanton in my spending.

Quite bluntly, O'Brian's dead, so he doesn't need the royalties. What about living authors, particularly those with a small market (ie Australians)? I feel some responsibility to buy these books new, on the radical assumption that authors have to eat. For a new book, I go to my local independent bookstore and, if they don't stock it, order it in.

I don't buy books from chain stores. I worry about having my information controlled by large conservative corporations; and anyway, the sheer mass of goods is overwhelming. Paradoxically, it's in a small store with handpicked stock that I am more likely to find something nestled against something else that I'm interested in. I've checked out Amazon, and the 'picks' that the machines suggest don't even come close to the cover that catches your eye, the title next to the one you went to get, that serendipitous find.